CHAPTER TWENTY
Dawson went briefly back to the Okohs’ to express his regrets that he had been unable to catch up with Yaw. He exchanged phone numbers with them and bade them goodbye for the time being. Never leave without a phone number if one is available. It was a fundamental rule.
Before he reached the Corolla, Dawson stopped in surprise. Fifty meters or so ahead of him, Akua Helmsley was interviewing a Dunkwa man while being filmed by Samuels. This woman is always one step behind me, he thought. Or ahead.
Dawson watched them as Helmsley finished up, thanked the man, and turned her attention to the video Samuels was playing back on what was obviously a very expensive camera. Dawson approached them.
“Chief Inspector,” she said with equal surprise as she saw him.
“Miss Helmsley.”
“Are you going to stop us from filming again?” she said with a teasing smile.
He smiled back. “This time I don’t believe I have any right to.”
“Then I’m very relieved. Come and have a look at this video I’m putting together for The Guardian to go out tonight.”
The interview was about two minutes long. Akua explained to Dawson that she would be trimming it down and doing a voice-over in English to summarize what the resident had said in Twi. The gist was he feared what was going to happen when the rain arrived late that night. With about two continuous days of downpour, flooding in Dunkwa was all but certain, and the last time that had happened it had been a disaster.
“I’ll be back here covering it in the midst of the storm tomorrow, but I want to give the prelude this evening.”
“Won’t that be dangerous, Miss Helmsley? Why not stay safely in Kumasi until the worst is over and then come back?”
“That’s for ordinary mortals and cowards.” She laughed. “Perhaps they’re one and the same. In any case, Dawson, I can assure you that Kumasi and Obuasi will have their share of the deluge, the only difference being that those towns don’t sit on a river the way Dunkwa sits on the Ofin.”
“It will break its banks, for sure,” Dawson said, thinking of people being swept away in the swirling current: a terrifying image for him.
“And I intend to be here to cover it. Care to join me?” She said it almost teasingly, as if daring him.
“Thank you, but no. I have a lot of work I need to get done at Obuasi. The office is a mess.” He realized too late that it sounded like a weak excuse.
“What brought you here today?” she asked.
“I came to talk to someone,” Dawson replied. “Do you know anything about the case of Amos Okoh-said to have drowned in one of the mining pits after falling off a bridge?”
“It was probably one of the handful of tragic cases I heard about, but I didn’t follow up on that one specifically. Why, does it have a bearing on the murder of Mr. Liu?”
“It might, yes.”
She looked at him contemplatively. “But I sense you’re not close to making an arrest.”
“That’s correct. I am not.”
“You’ll get it,” she said confidently. “I have faith in you.”
“Thank you very much.”
“Where do you go from here?” she asked him.
“I want to take a look at the scene of Amos’s drowning since I’m here.” He glanced up at the sky. “Hopefully I can beat the rain.”
“Is that your vehicle over there?” Akua said calculatingly.
She pointed at the Corolla and he said yes.
“Inspector,” she said in half amusement, “the terrain is going to slice that little thing in two. Why not let us take you there in the four-by-four? In any case, I would like to see the place myself.”
They circumnavigated the southernmost portion of Bao’s mining area and approached from the north instead. Between here and the shack stretched another moonscape expanse of yellow-gray soil churned up by excavators. Solitary shrubs poked out of the barrenness here and there, and Dawson wondered what determined their individual hardiness and ability to survive in the midst of devastation.
Ahead, a deep pond with craggy sides stretched longer than it was wide. It was across the shorter dimension that a simple rope suspension bridge was constructed. Its narrow deck, made of wooden planks lashed together, arced down toward the water’s surface and up again at the other side of the pond. At intervals, a vertical rope connected the planks with the upper rope that acted as a handrail.
“That must be the bridge the Okohs told me about,” Dawson said, pointing.
He, Akua, and Samuels alighted and walked toward the giant water-filled pit. As they drew closer, Dawson was struck that the water wasn’t the usual milky brown or yellow. Instead, it was blue.
“Why is it that color?” he asked Akua.
“Prussian blue,” she said without hesitation. “Some of the cyanide that AngloGold Ashanti uses to extract gold from the ore leaches into the soil and combines with iron oxide. That produces ferrocyanide, which is a blue color.”
“So that water contains cyanide?” Dawson asked, stunned.
“Yes.”
“So if I drink it, I’m a dead man?”
“Actually no. Because the cyanide is tightly bound to the iron, it’s no longer toxic.” She winked at him and smiled. “Still, I wouldn’t try it if I were you.”
“Don’t worry,” Dawson said dryly.
She gazed at the pond for a while, and then shook her head. “What a disaster.” She looked around. “The whole thing is a disaster.” Her voice shook a little, far different from the steady, professional tone she used in her video reports.
“How did you learn all this stuff?” Dawson asked with admiration.
She snorted. “The hard way. Sometimes people don’t want to tell you anything at all.”
Dawson approached the side of the pit where the rope bridge was lashed to two thick metal stakes implanted deeply into the soil two or three meters back from the edge. He had no interest in walking across the bridge, but he did want to see how it moved. He put one foot on the deck, depressed it a couple times, and generated a wave without too much effort. Then, standing to one side, Dawson pushed against the handrail until the bridge began to rock back and forth like a pendulum, the amplitude increasing with each shove.
Akua had been watching. “Looks quite precarious,” she commented.
“It is,” Dawson agreed. “I wouldn’t get on that thing if you paid me.”
But he could see how the bridge drastically cut down on the time it would take to walk around the pits to get from one side to the other. Time was money-or more precisely, gold.
He visualized what must have happened to Amos. His girlfriend, Comfort, came across the bridge from the other side of the pond. Bao was on this side and began to talk to her. Perhaps he was only being friendly, but that wasn’t the way Amos saw it as he appeared on the scene. Amos’s warnings to leave his girlfriend alone led to a shouting match, at the end of which Bao ordered Amos off “his” land. Were it not for Comfort pleading with Amos, he might have physically attacked Bao at that moment. Instead, he relented and went across the bridge to the other side with Comfort. But that wasn’t the end of the matter because Bao began to taunt Amos, capping it off with the insult that tops all. Furious, Amos turned back menacingly, machete in hand.
Panicking-or not-Bao began to rock the bridge even as Amos approached. Perhaps the young man stopped to catch his balance, or he might have tried to keep moving forward despite the violent swaying motion. At any rate, to the horror of Comfort and everyone else looking on, Amos tumbled in.
It seemed strange that nothing had been at hand-no pole, no rope-to use as a rescue device, but from Dawson’s years in the police force, he knew all about crowd paralysis-multiple onlookers apparently incapable of springing into action as a disaster unfolds before them, whether it is a drowning, beating, or a rape. So even if something had been available to pull Amos out of the water, precious and irretrievable seconds might have been lost. Now Amos was dead, and the murder of Bao that had followed was quite possibly in revenge for that death.